Translanguaging as Playful Subversion of a Monolingual Norm in the Classroom

Abstract

A large part of the literature on translanguaging as a pedagogical theory has explored how an inclusive multilingual pedagogy can support students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds to actively participate in the classroom. While much of this literature approaches classroom translanguaging as an instructional strategy designed to promote multilingual interactional practices, we analyse how multilingual practices can also take place as subversive language play in an educational context that is driven by a monolingual norm. Our data are video-recorded lessons from secondary-level Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms in Finland in which students whose L1 is Finnish are taught History through English. In bilingual educational programmes such as CLIL and immersion, it is not uncommon that teachers normatively assign L2 as the medium of interaction in whole-class talk and that students who share an L1 use it in peer interaction. We investigate how one student’s translanguaging takes place as a reaction to the teacher’s enforcement of the L2-only norm and is treated as ‘language mixing’ by other classroom participants. Drawing on conversation analytic methods, we describe the sequential unfolding and the normative context of the focal student’s translanguaging, as well as the practices of categorisation with which other students respond to his talk. We suggest that situations of normative conflict provide empirical materials to tease apart some differences between translanguaging and code-switching as social phenomena. Further, we argue that the meaning of translanguaging to participants cannot be established without considering its relation to locally upheld norms around language choice, which function as resources for the construction of language play, subversive identities and displays of (non-)investment in education in the present data.